Boston copes through a day of rumours, bomb threats and evacuations

BOSTON — Jackie Delaney sat on a bench in the sun on Bunker Hill Street in that proud one-square-mile slice of this city known as Charlestown.

Everyone knows everyone else in these parts. As Mr. Delaney greeted by name a steady stream of passersby, an older man, a retired firefighter, came by.

The two had a short exchange, and as the man left, he snorted, “They’ll get the sonofabitch, Jackie.”

For a while, it appeared that they had indeed done just that.

It was a day of rumours, bomb threats and evacuated buildings — part of a hospital, if only for a few minutes, and all of the Joseph Moakley federal courthouse, where, according to some reports from usually reliable sources, a suspect in Monday’s bombings at the finish line of the 117th edition of the Boston Marathon was under arrest and due at any moment to be arraigned.

None of it came to fruition, which is both good news (no more actual bombs) and bad (no actual arrest yet).

Pretty clearly, this is a city where the official security apparatus — 1,000-people strong, the task force is led by the FBI but with members drawn from across various law enforcement agencies, it is as leaky as any ship that size is bound to be — is understandably on edge.

Yet unofficial ordinary citizens are doing what Americans (they would say Bostonians, or break it down even further to neighbourhood, such as Southies) do best, that is, carrying on, though many, like Mr. Delaney, probably would prefer to see an arrest, “and the soonah the bettah,” as he put it in the inimitable Boston dialect that pretends there is no R in the alphabet.

After all, as Sarah Dyer, a born-and-bred Bostonian said Wednesday as she and Martin Belliveau, a transplanted Montrealer, strolled not far from the bomb site with their black lab, “We’ve done this before.”

Her eyes filled with tears as she accepted a compliment about the way her city has coped since becoming the first in North America to experience the full effects of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), meaning bombs that were aimed not to take down a powerful symbol of the Great Satan (as were the deadly 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the terror attacks of 2001), but rather to inflict maximum damage upon its vulnerable citizenry.

In this regard, bombing the marathon — with its thousands of cheering spectators and exhausted runners, all of them happily distracted — was akin to the bombing of shoppers going about their business at bazaars and markets in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. The only target was human.

Oklahoma City was carried out by the late Timothy McVeigh — he was executed by lethal injection after his conviction — and a helper named Terry Nichols, who is serving life with no chance of parole.

McVeigh was a kook, but of a recognizable and particular stripe: He was part of a loose American militia movement, ex-military, unsuccessful in life and the proverbial loner, filled with loathing for the federal government in all its forms (but particularly its ability to tax), and a regular fixture on this country’s busy gun show circuit.

Driven to avenge what he saw as law enforcement’s massacre of the Branch Davidian religious cult at Waco, Texas, he chose that very date — April 19 — two years later as the day to detonate his massive truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

Hundreds were injured, 168 people, including 19 children, killed.

Until Sept. 11, 2001, when 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four jets and drove them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and, thanks to the bravery of crew and passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 who forced their plane to crash in a Pennsylvania field instead of in Washington, Oklahoma City was the most devastating attack in the United States.

Until there’s an arrest in the marathon bombings — there wasn’t even a briefing Wednesday by the task force, with the only scheduled one abruptly postponed without explanation and replaced late in the day with a planned brief statement from the FBI, which was then itself cancelled — the great unanswered question is what sort of bomber he, or they, will be, a strange, homegrown, near-lone wolf native son like McVeigh, or someone with a broader goal, links to a political cause or at least a definable agenda?

Given the lack of a claim of responsibility from a terrorist group for the marathon bombing, and the fact that the 18th anniversary of the disaster at Oklahoma City is this Friday, the few signs there are augur for the former.

That may make it harder for Americans to get their heads around what happened here; it ought not to diminish in any way the deaths and horrific injuries of the marathon bombing, make the losses any less meaningful, but it may feel that way for a time.

In this historic city, where the first battles of the American Revolution were fought, where statuary to soldiers and various heroic figures is everywhere, there’s a bust on the Commonwealth Mall, a ribbon of green that runs up the centre of the wide avenue of the same name, of a man named Patrick Andrew Collins.

The bust is flanked by the statues of two women, one of lady liberty, the other who wears a crown of shamrocks and clearly symbolizes Mr. Collins’ native Ireland.

The inscription captures much about the best of this country, so like Canada and yet so different.

“Born in Ireland, and always her lover,” it reads. “American by early training and varied employment”.

Mr. Collins, whose family emigrated to these parts from County Cork when he was just a young ’un, began work as an upholster, a trade he practised for eight years.

Then he went to Harvard Law School, and at the age of 27, began practising as a lawyer. From there, he served as a member of the Massachusetts legislature, then as a member of Congress and finally as the mayor of Boston.